Elon Musk's Billionaire School , livre ebook

Also by Rob Sears
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First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Rob Sears, 2022
Illustrations copyright © Tom Holmes, 2022
The right of Rob Sears to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 947 3 eISBN 978 1 83885 948 0
Contents
Welcome to Billionaire School
Visualising your goal
Unit 1: Starting Out
Lesson 1: Don’t delay another moment
Lesson 2: Go where the growth is
Lesson 3: Head off on a road trip
Lesson 4: Drop out of college
Lesson 5: Stay up late with your start-up crew
Lesson 6: Consume a lot of sci-fi
Lesson 7: Be the alpha
Lesson 8: Splash out on something
Unit 2: Millions to Billions
Lesson 9: Find a new field to disrupt
Lesson 10: Play the probabilities
Lesson 11: Have a fallback plan
Lesson 12: Find your massive messianic mission(s)
Lesson 13: Embrace your eccentricity
Lesson 14: Take up space
Lesson 15: Unveil early
Lesson 16: Promise the moon
Lesson 17: Automate everything
Lesson 18: Create an ecosystem
Lesson 19: Reveal your cunning scheme
Lesson 20: Go to summer camp for billionaires
Lesson 21: Stop the drone uprising
Unit 3: How to Spend it (and how not to)
Lesson 22: Get a jet
Lesson 23: Indulge your extravagant side
Lesson 24: Get an alpha dog
Lesson 25: Ditch your earthly possessions
Lesson 26: Depend on the kindness of other billionaires
Lesson 27: Campaign against prejudice
Lesson 28: Buy, borrow, die
Lesson 29: Create a family office
Lesson 30: Plan your succession
Unit 4: Becoming a Technoking
Lesson 31: Generate free publicity
Lesson 32: Build a following
Lesson 33: Provide clickbait
Lesson 34: Be fought over
Lesson 35: Be a financial wizard
Lesson 36: Swat away pests
Lesson 37: Master the art of JDART
Lesson 38: Defend free speech – at any cost
Lesson 39: Ration your attention
Lesson 40: Be willing to change
Lesson 41: Distil your brand essence
Unit 5: Saving Humanity/Escaping Humanity
Lesson 42: Conduct a threat assessment
Lesson 43: Choose a backup planet
Lesson 44: Plan your new society
Lesson 45: Hack humans
Lesson 46: Do your bit for the population
Lesson 47: Let the simulation know you know
Graduating as a billionaire
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Welcome to Billionaire School
Most business schools promise an enriching experience, but not many can guarantee that their students will soon be among the world’s wealthiest people.
Elon Musk’s Billionaire School is different because the tips and home exercises in our curriculum are based on the proven strategies of today’s richest and most visionary tech billionaires, including Elon Musk himself.
That means we can guarantee * you a ten-figure net worth and at least one admiring profile piece in a major newspaper within thirty days of completing our course.
You’re on the verge of the super-rich life of your dreams. Picture it: you’ll be running either 69 or 420 different major tech companies at once. Your inventions will be so smart they’ll invent more inventions. Every single one of your ‘shower thoughts’ will spawn new industries, currencies, branches of law . . .
Some readers may be sceptical that we can really deliver on these fantastic claims. To remove any doubt, we’d like to share a few of the Frequently Asked Questions we sometimes get from prospective billionaires during our open days, along with our responses.
Q: How could a few lessons possibly make me a billionaire?
You should believe in yourself more! Just by opening this book you’ve demonstrated a proactive attitude to wealth accumulation. In fact, give or take $500 million, you’re halfway there already.
Let us try to lay out how straightforward it can be using a chart that many of our students find helpful.

You are currently at point 1 on the graph – you might not have much money but, all being well, you’ve plenty of time ahead of you. If you’re young, you might even be a ‘time billionaire’, with over a billion seconds left to spend however you please! All you have to do now is convert your remaining time on earth into dollars at a sufficiently quick rate that you can reach your target ‘WAD’ (wealth at death) before you become ‘time bankrupt’ and expire (point 2).
Success is that easy!
Q: I’ve heard that Elon Musk had a privileged up­ bringing. What if I don’t have the right back ground or education to be a billionaire?
It is true that many billionaires fit quite a narrow demographic. Musk is one of nine white men in the world’s top ten richest people according to Forbes . 1 His father owned properties stately enough to be rented out as embassies, 2 as well as a stake in an emerald mine in Zambia. 3
However, the Billionaire School is working to ensure that tomorrow’s extreme inequality is more diverse and inclusive. We offer grants, scholarships and mentoring programmes for both non-white and female candidates who have demonstrated a genuine interest in becoming billionaires (i.e. an accumulated net worth of $50 million or more).
Q: I don’t have any money. I’ve got family responsibilities and a job I can’t afford to leave. How do I even get started?
Please note that we also offer hardship bursaries. To apply, simply find our stand in the VIP section at the Davos conference.
Even if you don’t receive a bursary, consider what really matters in life. Your family might not see you so often, but wouldn’t they be happy if you came home one day with a billion dollars and an electric nanny?
As for your regular-paying job, you may not actually have to leave it. With hard work, anyone can accumulate a billion dollars. You’ll just have to be prepared to work weekends and take on overtime. And continue doing so for 15,000 years.
Admittedly, founding your own start-up might be a more practical route.
Q: What is your school’s connection with Elon Musk?
The Billionaire School is not officially endorsed by Elon Musk, as he has not replied to our emails, but his influence on our teaching and philosophy cannot be overstated. To us, he represents the pinnacle of what a billionaire can be. Not only does he have the most, he also gives the most, sharing with the world his technologies, his considered views on the issues of the day, his optimism for humanity’s multi-planetary future and his potent genetic material.
We also admire and have much to learn from other well-known tech billionaires. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s willingness back in the nineties to take on the evil might of independent bookstores, for example, remains an inspiration to us all. So too does the rise of youthful Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg. We can learn much from his healthy acquisitive appetite (ninety-four companies bought so far) and his unconventional and free-spirited decision not to create his own space programme, but travel into the metaverse instead. **
Q: If all this was really as easy as you claim, wouldn’t everyone be a billionaire?
Being a billionaire has come to be regarded as something that’s somehow ‘elite’, ‘exclusive’ or ‘out of reach’ – but that couldn’t be further from the truth. If you spend time with billionaires – in their private jets or while they’re getting blood transfusions from young donors, for instance 4 – you’ll find they are just like us. The only difference is that they’ve worked harder and smarter.
Today, the lives of the tech billionaires are public. Anybody can follow their example and emulate what they have – and if you don’t, you only have yourself to blame. In fact, we would go further: billionaires are the people saving our world, so if you’re not rich, or at least intent on getting rich, you’re not a good person.
At the Billionaire School we believe everyone should be focused on building their personal asset base, through any means possible. Yes, your path to wealth may require you to build a demonic AI, or ravage the environment and exacerbate climate change – but it’s only through the money you make that you can also hope to solve the terrifying problems you have created.
That’s why – if you want to be a billionaire – there’s nothing we’d find more enriching than to teach you.

* Not a guarantee. See lesson 16, ‘Promise the moon’.
** Beyond the tech world, we are also inspired by non-tech tycoons such as old-school French fashion magnate, Bernard Arnault, who has been #1 richest person as recently as 2021 but otherwise stays out of the limelight (he has a fortieth as many Google hits as Musk). Or #59, billionaire Qin Yinglin, with his pig-breeding empire. Although our school draws chiefly on the examples of high-profile tech billionaires, we believe the principles we teach can help students dominate any industry they choose.
Visualising your goal
To help you decide on a personal financial goal and track your progress as you work through this book, we’ve created the visualisation tool opposite.
The size of the large rectangle represents Elon Musk’s net worth at the time of going to press. To become an entry-level billionaire, however, you need only accumulate assets equivalent to the tiny rectangle at the top left. Looks pretty easy, right? If so, perhaps you’d like to set a more ambitious stretch goal. (We’ve added some other rectangles to the chart to help put these big numbers in perspective.)
Why not draw a box representing your objective and pin this page somewhere prominen